2006-08-15 - 7:50 p.m. - Grendel, by John Gardner
Grendel is a wonderful example of doing a lot with a little - the setup is basically "the story of Beowulf but from the perspective of the monster!", which has "10th-grade substitute teacher English assignment" written all over it. Thankfully, Gardner more or less jettisons the plot points of the original poem, with Beowulf himself turning up only in the last chapter. The choice of lead character, then, serves mainly to establish an atmosphere of doomed futility - Grendel is known to most of us solely as "one of the monsters that gets killed by Beowulf," so we're always very aware he's going to die and we know who's going to do it. Grendel, meanwhile, thinks himself basically immortal - so Gardner has a fine opportunity to play with a character torn between believing himself infinite and the audience sharing no such illusions.
Aside from setting the bleak tone, this angle also gives us an initial sympathy for Grendel, which is necessary to make the book work, since, after all, he is a vicious monster. He works as an antihero because we get to see all of his tortured (and tortuous) rationalizations and doubts and second-guessings that lead him from simple survival-pillage to a nihilistic campaign of murder against the Danish kingdom. The cleverest stroke by far is the decision to make Grendel's opposite number not Beowulf or the old king Hrothgar, but a minstrel storyteller whose ability to reshape people's impressions of history offends and bewilders the monster. So ultimately his motivation for destroying the Danes is not his considerable cruelty, but his hatred for their hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.
It's just enough material on which to hang a novella like this; to play it safe Gardner fleshes things out by bringing the epic's dragon in as a preacher of apathy and nihilism. Quite similar in outlook to the Dorok Emperors in Nausicaa, and placed at the midway point where so many legendary heroes meet a guide who makes the path clear, the dragon here performs the opposite function by cutting Grendel loose from all sense of purpose or potential for legacy.
The more well-grounded Clever Touches of this sort work very well, certainly better than the more overt stylistic put-ons sprinkled throughout the book. Issues of "who exactly is narrating right now?" crop up periodically for no good reason, and there are a number of cutesy anachronisms. In particular, I could have done without all the scenes where the old-timey people (particularly the priests) rattle off extremely convoluted, 20th-century-sounding theories and gibberish. I'll sort of accept it for the dragon (since the idea is that the dragon perceives all times at once) but it's distracting nonetheless.
But overall - good, poetic, memorable, and short.